Your mother doesn’t live here. Clean up after yourself.
Way back in the deepest recess of your formerly-adolescent mind, you heard that cliché in reference to your bedroom. Below the Farrah Fawcett poster, amongst the model cars (or maybe an X Box) was your dirty laundry. Or a pizza box, unfinished homework, candy wrappers or more likely all of the above.
But today it’s your spent shotgun shells on the ground.
Just like dirty socks in as a kid, you left them where they fell. Just a couple, forgotten in the excitement of a covey flush … or a double on jinking bobwhites (yes!).
No big deal. Until the birders visit next spring and surmise that all hunters are slobs. Or the local PETA chapter on their summer solstice drumming-and-sweat-lodge outing. Then, those empty hulls are just garbage.
Trash. And hunters are too, damned by the bright, shiny evidence shouting to the world that we are all gun-toting yahoos without regard for anyone or anything else, including our environment. Our coverts.
Those empties are no longer plastic and brass. They are an embarrassment to sportsmen – a condemnation of every one of us, a glinting example of our carelessness and disregard for others.
I’m reminded of a sign I saw above a locker-room door years ago: Our reputation depends on you, me, and us.
How about a more selfish reason: piles of shucked ammo show me where your honey hole is. And another: common courtesy. You wouldn’t be invited to his next barbecue if you dumped crap in your neighbor’s yard. Why dump it in our collective yard? Fellow hunters are your neighbors on public lands.
We have enough challenges: to the Second Amendment, finding ammo, continued access to public land, dogs that forget their training. And while we can’t sway rabid anti-hunters, we have plenty of chances to keep the non-hunting public on our side. The ones who vote, and stand up at public meetings. The folks who write letters to the editor and testify at game and fish department hearings.
So pick up your trash and someone else’s. Because if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Your choice.
Scott Linden Outdoors 
Mr. Linden,
My wife and I are avid viewers of your show even if they so often get lost in the background after the magical words ” Do You Remember” followed by reminenceses of hunts we have shared.
My comment comes to you from Austin, Texas, the land of private property and dependence on land owners and the state programs for places to hunt. Which will be lost by just one slob hunter on a ranch. Those bright shiny hulls are either the source of very big vet bills or a very big loss when they end up in a cow. I have only seen it personally one time but that one time caused the land owner to stop allowing people to hunt or fish on her property after she lost a registered cow to a single shotgun hull that tore out her cud. There might have been more to the story but it wouldn’t have mattered she felt that there was no respect for her property or generosity either one.
I would add the admonishment that clay shooting needs to be done at a club. Those bright orange and yellow pieces are an insult to a property owner enjoying a ride through their ranch. Same for the debris from cleaning birds. Nothing quit like smell from a pile of bird guts in the hundred degree heat that is so common to bird hunting here.
Please give Buddy a couple of ear rubs from his admirers down here in Texas and thank you for such a wonderful show on my favorite sport.
Thanks George. Your story really drives this point home. Buddy appreciates your good wishes.
You must know that “slob hunting” is more about killing for entertainment vs true need, but the trash angle is also a good one.
I think anyone who posts “kill shot” videos on YouTube, especially in slow motion, is probably a slob hunter. Glorifying the death scene is crass and often sadistic.
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